Monday, April 23, 2012

Signed: When You Were Me by Robert Rodi

Robert Rodi is a great author who wrote lots of fluffy gay fiction in the 90's like Fag Hag and Whatever Happened to Princess Paragon? This is his last mainstream published novel, a gay body-swap comedy.

I sent this to Robert Rodi in September as part of my American collection. I think I've read all of Mr. Rodi's books, but I got them from the library so this was the only one I had to send. Ironically this one I purchased is the one I haven't read yet. But it's high up there on my list.

Robert Rodi started writing non-fiction as it was more lucrative, and recently wrote a fiction book, The Sugarman Bootlegs, which he self-published on the Internet.

Rodi has a Kickstarter project currently ongoing for his next book. If you've never heard of Kickstarter it's the coolest thing ever. One of the problems with the digital age is that a lot of content is made available for free. One of the things I've always been concerned with is how to pay for the things I enjoy. I want people who make gay themed movies to get paid, but I don't need a copy of the DVD. I have no space for storage and my harddrive, which can fit hundreds of movies, is much more convenient. Kickstarter starts to address this kind of issue.

The way it works is someone has an idea for a project and puts up a video and proposal. It can be anything. In Rodi's case, it is I need $2000 to spend a month of my life writing this new book and still be able to afford to live. In other cases, the person may want to publish a gay themed graphic novel and not have the required $5000 to take the book to print. There's all kinds of stuff, I want to open a hot dog stand, to I run a small non-profit theatre and want to buy the rights to put on a play.

There are incentives for backing at different levels and you only pay the money if enough people agree to back you and the project is funded. If you say you need $5000 and get $4995, people pay nothing, the project is not funded and you're done.

It's a great way to get smaller artist's work out there and to support artists you believe in. As of this exact moment, Rodi's Kickstarter project only has 60 hours to go so click the link and pledge him now.